No trials for expense-fiddling peers
PEERS who fiddle their expenses will no longer be prosecuted after Parliament intervened in a trial to exert its authority over the criminal courts.
Lord Hanningfield, the disgraced former Tory peer, had been accused of abusing the House of Lords expenses system by claiming his generous £300a-day subsistence allowance, despite spending as little as 40 minutes a time in Westminster.
But on the opening day of his trial prosecutors were forced to offer no evidence when Parliament torpedoed the case by insisting such matters were for it and not the criminal courts.
The intervention, which came almost a year after Lord Hanningfield was first charged, means the courts are virtually powerless to prosecute peers who abuse the very system that was introduced to clean up Parliament.
Sources at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) last night expressed frustration at the last-minute decision.
Lord Hanningfield, 76, who was charged under his given name, Paul White, was jailed in 2011 after being convicted of fiddling £14,000 in parliamentary expenses, by claiming for overnight stays in London, when in fact he was returning to his home in Essex. After being released from prison he once again returned to the House of Lords, but last year was charged again, this time in relation to the new expenses system that allows peers to claim a daily allowance of up to £300.
The former pig farmer was accused of falsely claiming £3,300 by clocking in to the Palace of Westminster but then leaving a short time later.
Prosecutors claimed that on the days in question he had not been engaging in parliamentary work and was therefore not entitled to the allowance.
But at the eleventh hour lawyers for the House of Lords contacted the trial judge, Alistair McCreath, warning that it was not for the courts to decide what constituted parliamentary work.
Exercising the arcane rule of “exclusive cognisance”, intended to protect parliamentary independence, the Westminster authorities effectively overruled the criminal justice system.
Lord Hanningfield’s prosecution was the first to be brought since the expenses system was overhauled in the wake of the revelations exposed by The Daily Telegraph in 2009. But sources at the CPS said following the decision, it would “almost certainly be the last”.